Source of the Tavy (1823)

Vancouver, Charles. General view of the agriculture of the county of Devon; with observations on the means of its improvement. London: Richard Phillips, 1808. Chap. XI. pp. 282 283.The most elevated part of the forest, and that in which the Tavy, the East and West Ochment, the Taw, the Teign, the East and West Dart rivers, have their source and head branches, consists of one continued chain of morass, answering in every respect the character of a red Irish bog. This annually teems with a luxuriant growth of the purple melic grass, rush cotton grass, flags, rushes, and a variety of other aquatic plants, and which annually growing, and proceeding to decay, has at length raised this part of the forest from five to forty, or perhaps fifty feet, above the plain or foundation upon which it first originated: a quantity of vegetable matter thus annually accumulating, supplies the use of an enlarged sponge, for retaining a farther increase of water, and thus the bog is imperceptibly, though in fact, annually increasing in its bulk and height, so long as its base is able to sustain it. This, however, in some places, appears to have been overcharged with morass, as prodigious slips of several acres in breadth were observed to have parted at different times from the great field or body of morass above, and thus making frightful chasms from the surface to the bottom and former resting place of the bog.[Text may be taken from a different source or edition than that listed as the source by Somers Cocks.]

Etching

102x137mm